Srebrenica massacre verdicts upheld at war crimes tribunal

A judge at the UN Yugoslav tribunal has upheld the convictions of five men for their role in the Srebrenica massacre.

Sentences for four of the men, high-ranking officials in the Bosnian Serb Army in 1995, were also confirmed.

They had appealed against their convictions in 2010 for a range of crimes including genocide.

About 8,000 Bosnian men and boys were killed in Srebrenica in just three days in 1995 – the worst atrocity on European soil since the Holocaust.

Two of the men – Vujadin Popovic and Ljubisa Beara – are among just a few to have been found guilty of genocide.

They were sentenced to life for deliberately targeting and destroying groups of people based on their ethnicity.

Those life sentences were confirmed on Friday, as were the sentences of 35 years for Drago Nikolic, and 13 years for Vinko Pandurevic. The sentence of the fifth man, Radivoge Miletic, was reduced from 19 to 18 years.

The atrocity took place a few months before the end of the Bosnian war, when 20,000 refugees fled to Srebrenica to escape Serb forces.

It was an enclave protected by UN Dutch soldiers but was overrun by paramilitary troops led by the Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic – after which reports of atrocities began to emerge.

Some of the accused reported directly to Gen Mladic – who is himself currently on trial at the tribunal in The Hague, also accused of genocide.